Prof. David Spergel, Emeritus Professor of Astrophysics at Princeton University

A brief history of the universe and its possible death scenarios, WMAP, ACT, and WFIRST projects, inflation, dark energy, dark matter, and alternative theories, and artificial intelligence to aid cosmology and astrophysics.

Prof. David Spergel is the director of the Center for Computational Astrophysics at Flatiron Institute and Emeritus Professor Princeton University. His research interests range from the search for planets around nearby stars to the shape of the universe. Using microwave background observations from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, he has measured the age, shape, and composition of the universe. He is currently co-chair of the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) science team. WFIRST will study the nature of dark energy, complete the demographic survey of exoplanets, characterize the atmospheres of nearby planets and survey the universe with more than 100 times the field of view of the Hubble Space Telescope.